| bory on Wed, 18 Jun 2003 09:41:41 +0200 (CEST) |
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| [Nettime-ro] For your attention |
Bory spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it. ------- Note from Bory: Mai multe lucruri despre Bienala, as seen by Adrian Searle, critic la The Guardian. ------- To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Stop that racket The 50th Venice Biennale is full of ideas. Too bad it doesn't know when to stop, says Adrian Searle Adrian Searle Monday June 16 2003 The Guardian "I am convinced that art is nothing. Nothing, pain." This is not the curatorial manifesto of the current Venice Biennale, nor a blinding revelation in the mind of the critic, though it might be. It is the introduction to a work by Belgrade-born artist Mladen Stilinovic, in which all the definitions of an entire dictionary are replaced by the single repeated word: Pain. The pages of the dictionary go on, yard after yard, along the walls of the Corderia, the medieval rope-making factory in Venice's ancient Arsenale, where several of the projects of the 50th biennale are housed. There are hundreds of artists and works in Venice, which opened to the public last Sunday. So many voices and idioms, so many fractured dialogues, so many languages. Everyone comes to Venice, but everyone comes from somewhere else. There can be no totalising critique or curatorial stance, nor any shared artistic value we can depend on. Only one thing is certain: that pain is universal. The Venice Biennale always has some kind of baggy theoretical rubric, and the director of this year's event, Francesco Bonami, has titled it Dreams and Conflicts - The Dictatorship of the Viewer. Unwisely following Martin Luther King, Bonami's introductory essay is called I Have a Dream. Dreams, conflict, dictatorship? Luckily, none of this need bother us very much. It is just a desperate wrestling with words. The actual complexities and conflicts of 21st-century art, ideas and culture are really taking place at ground level. What one remembers, and what matters, is the contributions of the artists themselves - however swamped they might seem at the time by the intrigues and manoeuvres, the practical and political battles, the gossip and rumours of the opening days at Venice. Venezuelan artist Pedro Morales has closed his own show, in protest against the political situation in his country. Spain's official artist, Santiago Sierra, has built a wall blocking off the entrance to his pavilion. You need a Spanish passport to gain entry to the building, through the back door, which in any case is empty but for the detritus of the last biennale. The work is about borders and rights, and in particular Spanish immigration policy. Better, perhaps, if he had barred entry to Spaniards and let everyone else in. The idea of the closed or wrecked pavilion as an exhibit isn't new: Hans Haacke tore up the floor of the German pavilion, to great effect, 10 years ago, and many artists closed their shows in protest against the Vietnam war back in the 1960s. Sierra knows that protest is largely nullified by being accepted and approved. It gets incorporated, it gets curated. That is the real pain of his, of most, extreme artistic gestures. It is the pain of impotence, felt by curators and artists alike. Welsh artist Bethan Huws closed her show because she couldn't get the perfect viewing conditions for her film. The British brouhaha over the very existence of the Scottish and Welsh pavilions saw the world through the wrong end of the telescope. The Scottish and Welsh representations were disappointing group shows with one or two good things in them. Artists don't fight to show at Venice to become material for the quasi-artistic aspirations and personal and diplomatic ambitions of curators, nor to become fodder for official cultural commissars. But issues of nationalism are hard to avoid here. The sedate British pavilion in the Giardini got a much needed shake-up this year with Chris Ofili's show. I get the feeling that the British Council just wanted tea and scones and some nice art on the walls as usual, while Ofili fought to create something more difficult and risky. He is trying to change the relationship between his work and the viewer, by presenting it within an environment that extends the space of the paintings themselves. In part, he wants the viewer to feel inside the work, just as he was when he was making it: not as a fake studio, but as a psychological territory, a mental as well as physical space. Artists in other media have been doing this sort of thing for years, but few painters take this kind of risk with their works. The British pavilion could have looked like something out of a TV home makeover show; instead Ofili, working with architect David Adjaye has not only created one of the best national pavilions, but shown a real development of his artistic language. The side rooms of drawings don't work, it must be said, but the show's central room, with its complex suspended canopy of coloured glass (an innovative yet deceptively simple piece of engineering), and the views through to the green and red rooms beyond, are astonishing and coherent. One comes away with the feeling of having travelled somewhere. The same is true, in a sense, of the Danish pavilion, radically transformed by Olafur Eliasson, who will be doing the next Unilever Turbine Hall project at Tate Modern. It is filled with perceptual tricks and conundrums: reversed perspective spy-holes, a camera-obscura view of the trees and sky above, lots of tricksy kaleidoscopic mirrors, spiky sci-fi caves and geometric oddities. But I found it wearying and essentially trivial. Its 2,750 wall tiles made of compressed soil, yellow room that makes everyone look sick and various temporary staircases are art as funhouse entertainment. In fact, most of the installation work is overcooked, including Fred Wilson's American pavilion, in which the artist simply shows too much, making too many bullet points about black history and identity, both in relation to Venetian history and his own experience as a black American artist. The only thing that stayed with me was the black glass chandelier and the globe of the world with the seas painted black. Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, who fixed a little camera to her dog's head and filmed the world from a dog's-eye view, has similarly conflated a very effective idea with too many appeals to history and artistic context, even including a soundtrack of Glenn Gould playing Bach. If only the composer had been a Canadian, too, it would have been perfect. Notions of national identity, nationhood and representation are always present at Venice, consciously or not, overtly or otherwise. They are the subtext to what is, in part, a political as well as a cultural event. Inside the Italian pavilion, however, where Francesco Bonami has installed his keynote group show, all the artists seem to be doing their own thing. Older works - a seminal Dan Graham work from the 1970s, Warhol's great rediscovered and restored 1965 movie Inner and Outer Space - appear beside more recent things, including a vast and very good Damien Hirst medicine cabinet filled with pills and capsules (legal and illegal), and a dreadful Sarah Lucas that seems to be making some crass point about Italianness - her display features an old motorbike and sidecar, the sidecar covered in pizza home-delivery flyers. It is an amiable enough collection of single works, though whether or not the exhibition points us anywhere is doubtful. The most memorable work in the pavilion is by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco (who is also a guest curator in the Arsenale). He has copied a crumbling roofed patio by architect Carlo Scarpa, erected for the 1952 Biennnale, which stands just yards away, almost forgotten until now. Orozco's piece, freshly made in plywood, reminds us of how playful the architect's work is, and of the status of art as future ruin. It is a beautiful moment. Pedro Cabrita Reis's sculpture in the Portuguese pavilion is a long, two-storey framework, running the length of the pavilion, with open doors in place of walls. He also has a work in the Giardini: a large, temporary building, air-conditioned, lit by strip lights. Both are simple constructed architectural spaces, and also places to stop and think about your own presence. This is where thinking can really begin, and issues actually start to count. These works, making reference to the everyday, create their own dialogues: with the viewer, and with the other works the viewer has seen. One needs to slow down for this to happen. All the shows, as well as many single works in the biennale, easily warrant long consideration to themselves. Karin Mamma Andersson's paintings in the Nordic pavilion, so easily overlooked, are strange, half-dissolved images, filled with references to other painters (from Dick Bengtsson to Picabia, Peter Doig to Luc Tuymans), as well as to mental states - dream, reverie, memory, tiredness (one is even called Sleeping Standing Up). They demand intimacy, quiet and, most of all, time. Bonami has invited 11 other curators to set up thematic shows in the Corderia and Arsenale. His own exhibitions - the Italian pavilion and the painting at the Museu Correr in St Mark's - aren't much more than compendiums (the painting show is arranged with the witless literalism of the anthologist). The invited curators all want to take on more or less urgent issues. They stick their necks out - but the point invariably gets lost, the ideas swamped, the niceties of juxtaposition, parallel references and exhibition design obscured in the stampede to be seen and heard. Hou Hanru has set up a Zone of Urgency in the Arsenale. Life in Asia is chaotic, Hanru's idea seems to be, so let us reflect that chaos and the multiplicity of simultaneous events with yet more chaos. Utopia Station, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, wants us to consider what happened to the idea of utopia, but the answer is evident: there is so much going on that consensus and shared ideals are impossible. Someone's utopia is everyone else's dystopia. The efforts of other curators, including Catherine David on contemporary Arab representations and Gilane Tawadros on African art, are similarly subsumed in the madness. Neither has space to do very much to any great effect. The Arsenale feels like an art souk: instead of storytellers and shoe-menders, letter-writers and carpet-sellers, we have artists of all descriptions, and issues desperate to be raised. This clamour, you say, is how the world is, and art is part of it. But for the spectator to deal with all this, we have to be cruel, or be swept along in the mass. We need to be slowed down. In Orozco's small and considered selection of artists in the Arsenale, there is a bit of plastic plumbing pipe, with a hand-drawn sign on the floor next to it, by Jimmie Durham. The sign says: "Please do not shit on this piece." That is, implicitly, what all art says - except the ergonomically challenging toilets in Utopia Station, designed by Atelier van Lieshout, and even here you are instructed not to use them. Artists are better at creating the conditions where the art doesn't get shat on than most curators are, who often don't have a clue how to install work, and don't know when to stop. Sometimes at Venice I felt I was looking at curatorial style, rather than art itself. The dictatorship of the viewer is one thing, that of the curator another. Dictatorship's only place, in my view, is in the hands of the artist. · The Venice Biennale runs until November 2. Details: 00 39 04 12 72 83 97. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited _______________________________________________ Nettime-ro mailing list Nettime-ro@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ro --> arhiva: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/